This Day in History: The Copenhagen hypnosis murders happened on this day in 1951. The Copenhagen hypnosis murders were a double-murder case in connection with a failed bank robbery that happened in Denmark on 29 March 1951. After extensive police, psychiatric and psychological investigations and the ensuing trial proceedings, two people were convicted of the murders: Palle Hardrup and Bjørn Schouw Nielsen. It was the view of the trial court, in a decision that the Danish Supreme Court affirmed, that Schouw Nielsen had hypnotized the 28-year-old Hardrup to carry out the robbery and the murders. When Hardrup committed the robbery, he shot one of the bank's cashiers and then the branch manager. Hardrup then fled by bicycle to a nearby street and entered a building. Several eyewitnesses went in after him, and the police were directed to the stairwell where Hardrup had tried to hide. Hardrup quickly surrendered to the police without resistance.
After the robbery, the police department began to suspect that Nielsen might have used hypnosis to manipulate Hardrup to commit the bank robbery and the related murders. The theory was corroborated by forty witness statements from prisoners and guards at Horsens State Prison: these statements suggested that Hardrup was already under Nielsen's mental control in prison. The guards and prisoners reported that Nielsen manipulated Hardrup like a puppet and that he was able to make Hardrup behave as if he were in a trance. Hardrup had also told several fellow inmates that Nielsen hypnotized him regularly.
After an extensive set of legal proceedings that ended eventually in 1955, Palle Hardrup was sentenced to be imprisoned indefinitely at the Institution of Herstedvester. The Danish Supreme Court upheld Bjørn Schouw Nielsen's sentence to life imprisonment, and declined to reopen the case. At the time of the Supreme Court's decision, the Danish Medico-Legal Council had stated that they were unable either to confirm or dispute the theory that you can hypnotize someone into committing a crime. However, in December 1956, after a thorough examination of the case file, the Council issued its final public statement on the case, finding that there had been a significant mental disorder in Hardrup's state of mind - the influence of another person, which in these circumstances involved hypnosis. A few years later, the subcommittee of the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights reopened the case for special consideration. In 1960, the subcommittee found that Nielsen had been properly convicted by the Danish judiciary. This decision was further upheld by the Human Rights Court in 1961. Both Nielsen and Hardrup were released, independently, in 1967. Bjørn Schouw Nielsen committed suicide with potassium cyanide in 1974. Palle Hardrup died in 2012.
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